


Spidergramps

by Not_You



Series: Eight-Armed Hugs [9]
Category: The Amazing Spider-Man (Movies - Webb), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Animal Instincts, Blankets, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Candy, Comfort Food, Couch Cuddles, F/M, Family Feels, Gen, Physical Disability, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Robots, Sewing, Spiders, Steve Rogers Feels, Weaving, adaptive equipment, stickers improve everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-26
Updated: 2015-06-26
Packaged: 2018-04-06 06:40:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4211871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Not_You/pseuds/Not_You
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is very important to the girls that their grandpa feel safe and loved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spidergramps

**Author's Note:**

> Gwen and Peter are visiting from my fic 'Access,' but you don't have to have read it. She survived being hurled to her death with a spinal injury, and Peter has built some of her adaptive equipment. This includes cute robots.

Watching the brood with Bucky makes Natasha remember a primate study Bruce had shown her, where isolated monkeys experienced almost complete recovery when placed with younger monkeys who had been allowed to develop normally. Not that there's much normal about the girls by human standards, but they seem to be helping Bucky a lot. Around adults he's still wary and strange, but with the girls he's almost desperately loving and involved. Steve says they're like handholds for Bucky, keeping him in the present, where he doesn't have to kill anyone and Zola's silver arm and its various fail-safes have been replaced with a sleeker black one of Tony's own design.

For their part, the girls begin each day by putting fresh stickers on Grandpa's arm, to make it pretty. They love him almost as much as Steve does, and on much shorter acquaintance. Anastasia had just been starting to feel too tall the way girls seem to at this age, but now she knows she looks like Grandpa. Zhanna and Zoya have made it their mission in life to give him plenty of hugs, and Alisa is always feeding him something while Ariadna has taken it upon herself to manage his hair, trimming and shaping the cheap, artless cut he arrived with. Marina is a little more standoffish, almost always the most wary of her sisters, but even she is happy to teach him to play nice happy video games with no shooting, and to listen when he reads out loud to them from nice happy stories with no killing. Natasha is honestly touched by how careful the girls are of Bucky's feelings while remaining their horrible bloodthirsty selves. They love violent games and weapons training with their parents, but around Bucky they are at their sweetest, and the worst he has to put up with is loud squealing over Spiderman.

By this point the girls have met Gwen and know that it would be hopeless even without the age gap and sharing issues, but he remains their gold standard and they cut out pictures of him and act ridiculous whenever he comes to the tower. It's enough to make Bucky glower at poor Peter at first, just waiting for him to be a creep and respond, or to be a jerk and hurt the brood's feelings. Gwen is a lot of help here, sticking close to Peter and being so nice to the girls that they can't hate her. It's really a masterful piece of work, and Gwen laughs when Natasha takes her aside to tell her so.

“I can hardly blame them, you know,” she says, glancing over to where Peter is using Marina's hair to to show Bucky how to make a French braid in Rada's, everyone looking much more relaxed now that Bucky has decided that Peter is worthy of breathing the same air as his precious grandbabies. “I just take it as a sign of their good taste.”

Natasha chuckles. “It's kind of you to say, but you have my permission to unleash robots on them if they get too troublesome.”

“Mom,” Ariadna chides, appearing at her elbow, “Gwen's robots are busy helping her!”

“Not always,” Gwen says, a flick of one finger against the arm of her wheelchair sending one of her little helperbots skittering around to bump into Ariadna's heel and make her jump. Bucky's head snaps up, but he relaxes as all three of them laugh.

“Don't worry, Grandpa,” Ariadna says, going to hug him from behind so he won't have to let go of Rada's hair and mess up the braid, “Gwen wouldn't hurt me for real.”

“Besides,” Peter adds, “most of the actual self-defense hardware is built into the chair.” When the hairdressing is done, Gwen wheels over to inspect the results and Bucky even talks to her, which is pretty good for Bucky. It probably helps that he was a fan of science fiction when it was just beginning to be a thing, and is fascinated by Gwen's adaptive equipment. He's very polite about the questions he asks, and Gwen is glad to answer them. By the time she and Peter start glancing at the time and muttering about how they should really get going, Bucky has allowed the little bot that had alarmed him to crawl into his lap and beeble at him for a while. It's a cute little design. Big-eyed and nonthreatening while still being slightly insectile. It looks like something Natasha would eat, but those are spider instincts talking.

After Gwen and Peter have gone Bucky relaxes a lot more. When it's just him, the girls, and the team, he's really almost all right, not the cautious, wide-eyed creature he had been around their guests. He's still a little jumpy sometimes, but he feels as safe with them as he can feel. Now Anastasia demands a piggy-back ride and he grins, turning his back to her but not crouching at all, so she has to make a real leap. He catches her like some kind of normal human who doesn't panic when anything else attacks him behind, and runs around in enormous circles, holographic butterfly stickers gleaming. Anastasia clings to him, laughing and shrieking, and Clint beams at them.

Bucky also provides the girls with a real focus for their weaving and sewing. Natasha had of course never been allowed to waste time playing with fibers, but now she finds herself fascinated as the girls form their own little workshop. It helps that their uncle Tony can make a frame loom in under a minute, and that they have a very patient father who will sit still and let them use him to wind yarn. They have made several experimental pieces already, and when they learn that Grandpa has nightmares about being frozen, they decide to make him a nice, warm blanket.

There are easy fleece sets that can be tied together in minutes, but of course that's not good enough for Bucky. They insist on a gorgeous almost-amber yellow qiviut, 'because it's the warmest color,' and Tony provides over the nagging of Clint's frugal instincts. The girls are overjoyed to find the stuff almost entirely free of guard hairs, and weave two enormous squares to cover a down comforter. The whole thing would probably keep Bucky warm at sixty below and he will almost certainly never need it to, but his eyes fill with tears when they present it to him, and he hugs each of them for a long time before Ariadna tells him to stop being dumb and use the blanket, which makes him laugh. JARVIS lowers the temperature of Steve's living room enough that they won't all get heat stroke, and the ten of them settle on the floor, the blanket big enough to wrap around them all.

Steve's gratitude on Bucky's behalf is just pathetic, and Natasha won't even let him finish thanking her. “No,” she says, leaning into a pike stretch as Steve does the same beside her, “don't thank me for the girls loving their grandfather. That's all them. And him, he's kind of adorable.”

Steve laughs softly, sounding terribly close to tears. “It really does help him, though. I... I couldn't do anything for him, right at first. Showers scared him and crawling in next to him scared him and... it's just good to see him warm.”

“You mammals and your face-leaking,” Natasha mutters, and Steve laughs again.

“You know that he's actually started looking for some of the candy we used to like, so he can share it with the girls?”

“Was it as gross then as it is today?”

“More, depending on who you ask.”

A few days later the girls are all eating horrific things called Chuckles, little ribbed, gelid elliptical cylinders in black, green, yellow, orange, and red, covered with granulated sugar. They're appalling, but Natasha loves watching the girls sit with Bucky, trading flavors around the table. None of the girls like the licorice ones, but they're Bucky's favorite, so it works out well. Steve doesn't have much of a sweet tooth, but sometimes begs a few of the lime, and the entire team enjoys the Mary Janes that come next. Horehound drops are the least popular, with the girls indifferent and Tony left alone to eat one after another, occasionally yelling, “This tastes like Grandma's fucking handbag, why do I like it?” and “Damn you, Barnes!” It's a testament to Bucky's ongoing recovery that when he and Natasha overhear, he snickers in a way that makes him look the same age the girls do.

**Author's Note:**

> Qiviut is musk ox underfur, traditionally plucked from the bushes they shed it on in the spring, and it's one of the softest, warmest, and because of the labor-intensive processing, most expensive things in the world. These days people run qiviut farms, but you still have to comb the stuff off a musk ox and then make sure there are no guard hairs in it.


End file.
